.NET Based Weblog App Update

by Bryan on 12/5/2002 at 3:45 PM in Developer Stuff

It seems like I've been working on this .NET based weblog application forever! Truth is, I really haven't done much with it since summer. The problem right now is that it works for me, but I wouldn't be comfortable handing it out to anyone else - but I want to. So the dilemma is finding time to clean things up and finish up some features that are still undone.

Here is what it has so far:

  • a custom server control for handling the templating needs of the weblog, including entries, archives, comments, and trackbacks
  • An XML Schema that provides Intellisense to the HTML view for said server control.
  • It generates valid RSS 2.0 XML files.
  • It includes an RSS Feed Reader.
  • It includes a commenting system.
  • It includes a trackback system.
  • It can ping weblogs.com when an entry is created or updated.
  • It can handle multiple weblogs.
  • It has a hierarchical permission system for allowing/disallowing activity based on user roles.
  • You can specify when an entry goes live.
  • You can specify when an entry has expired.
  • You can assign entries to categories.
  • There is a comment notification system that emails each distinct person that has posted a comment for a specific post whenever there is a new comment, including the person who posted the entry initially.
hmm...what else? That is all I can think of for now. Things that need to be done:
  • User admin is incomplete
  • Fixed (almost) - I wrote an XML Schema for RSS - it works for 0.91,0.92, and 2.0 (working on 1.0) - I should have known better than to trust the dataset to infer the proper schema.Currently read RSS feeds into datasets - this works as long as elements are not duplicated at different levels within the file: this is bad because you could specify for example a category element as a child of channel and also as a child of item, which results in an error like this when reading the XML:
    The same table (category) cannot be the child table in two nested relations.
    The catch is that this implementation easily handles 95% of the feeds I subscribe to, in all flavors of RSS. If I fix the problem, I will end needing to add code to handle the variations in the other flavors (I know, I'm lazy)
  • I'd like to clean up the HTML that is rendered by the custom server control. It needs to be more like the repeater control in that if you don't put the HTML in one of your templates, it doesn't get added to the page.
  • Finally, I'd like to overhaul the UI for the admin area.
To be clear, this is not a complete list, there are more things to do, I just can't remember what they are at the moment.

So there you have it. I guess I should post something over at metaApps so that people who end up there but not here know that it isn't dead.